Thread by @thomasafine

Masha Drokova did PR for Jeffrey Epstein???

Holy shit.

She's a Russian who moved to America and became a successful Venture Capital investor.

She was also a leader of Nashi, one of the two big Russian nationalist youth movements.

And... she famously kissed Putin.
putinskissmovie.com/about.html

Here's the entire movie. Not sure if it's a legit copy but it works at the moment.

Here's the claim that she did PR for Epstein. I'm not sure why a successful VC investor would be doing PR.

sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/w…

A second possible link to Epstein appears to be through Rachel Wolfson, a journalist who has covered Drokova several times, and also covered Epstein, though Wolfson was later accused of planting PR stories for Epstein.

nytimes.com/2019/07/21/bus…

I'm not the first to notice this apparently. There's another claimed link too, though I haven't fully verified it. The person who sponsored bringing Drokova to the U.S. met Epstein in Russia many years ago, and is alleged by some to have an ongoing connection to him.

I've known about Drokova for a long long time. Since the very beginning of my interest in Trump-Russia. Why? Because she was on the invite list to Rykov's election night party in Moscow.

But maybe this invite was tongue-in-cheek? She was notorious in Russia. Except that she has very strong ties to NTechLab, and Rykov's guest-of-honor (for unknown reasons) to his election night party was a founder of NTechLab, Aleksandr Kabakov.

I've always found some of Drokova's ventures while in the U.S. troubling. She seemed to be targeting technologies that might specifically be useful for Russian purposes.

Things like Icon8 and Chatfuel, both of which involved AI chat bot software.

And StealthWorker, a contract service for finding cybersecurity specialists.

But it's her connection to NTechLab that I find most troubling. I believe she was funneling U.S. VC money into NTechLab after she moved here.

NTechLab is now at least 37% owned by Rostec, i.e. the Russian government.

NTechLab uses AI to do big data analysis. The exact kind of analysis you'd need if you had a vast collection of election information to deal with.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1083062158194368512

If you wanted to, for example, use voter rolls and psychometric profiles to figure out how to most efficiently swing a U.S. election through social media manipulation, a company like NTechLab would be perfect.

Rykov's star guest, Kabakov, founder of NTechLab, was famous because of his company/software findface.pro.

Findface is (was?) owned by Alfa Bank.

You remember Alfa Bank right? It's one of the two organizations that had the unexplained data communications over some months with the Trump organization before the 2016 election.

The other organization of course being Spectrum Health, with links to Nancy Devos and Erik Prince.

So, not to get too far afield here, Masha Drokova has very strong links to Epstein, Rykov, and... Putin.

But just to go farther afield again for a minute... Erik Prince did actually have connections to Cambridge Analytica, and to EmerData, a spinoff/successor company.

And Devos (sorry above, it's Betsy not Nancy; I don't know why I make that mistake a lot) was the chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She was succeeded by Saul Anuzis, who's son worked for... Cambridge Analytica.

And for the record, if you actually watch the movie Putin's Kiss, it's about how Drokova befriends a journalist critical of Russia, and that journalist is then beaten nearly to death, which supposedly leads to a change of heart for Drokova.

It's a HORRIBLE cover story for a spy/agent because it is so painfully, obviously TOO MUCH of an explanation for someone moving here. It's not a low profile cover story.

But then, this is how Russia does things. Maria Butina was never in hiding. She was loud and proud.

This is why her doing PR for Epstein seems so out of left field.

The VC gig makes sense — If Russia was seeking U.S. investors to provide U.S. dollars to create tech useful for Russian advantage, this would be a genius move. I don't even think it would be illegal.

But why have Drokova do PR for him?

He DID invest heavily in tech. I've seen some hints that he may have invested in Drokova's companies, but no clear evidence. That would certainly fit all of this though.